<p>Change Makers Humberto and Isabelle operating the drill rig with LWI staff Stanley</p>
I want to highlight two of the folks who are instrumental to LWI’s drilling efforts in Guatemala: Gerson, from Guatemala, and Stanley, from nearby El Salvador. They are part of a larger, six-person team that also led community education sessions on hygiene, nutrition information, and more, but it was Stanley and Gerson who had the know-how and experience that it took to drill the well. I was expecting the drilling to be intensive, but I had not realized how much equipment and technical ability was required. At least three different heavy-equipment trailers and two trucks were needed to drill, pump, lift, lower, and raise the different components needed for the drill. Stanley and Gerson taught the rest of us to use the machinery and made sure that we didn’t break anything or hurt ourselves. The rig consists primarily of a big hydraulic drill some 18 feet long, eight feet wide, and 15 feet tall. A hydraulic elevator lifts a spinning platform some ten feet above the ground. Metal tubes two meters in length and six inches in diameter are thrust into the ground, spinning along their axis, with a drill bit on the end designed to pulverize rock. A second piece of heavy machinery connects to the drill and pumps water under high pressure through the metal tubes and out of the end of the drill bit, which in turn pushes the pulverized bits of rock, sand, and mud up and out of the hole that is being drilled. Once a tube is driven completely into the ground, it is disconnected at the bottommost position, the elevator rises to the top of the lift, and another tube is connected between the recently driven tube and the elevator platform, allowing us to add depth to the well in two-meter increments. Isabelle was particularly skilled (or perhaps lucky) and managed to drill through about eight meters in about 30 minutes. At times, I was much less lucky. Near the end of the week, when the well was close to being finished, I encountered a particularly stubborn rock. It took me over an hour and a half to make six measly inches of progress. Over the week, the well collapsed three different times, meaning that we would have to remove the drill in its two-meter tube increments and begin again from the surface to clear the rubble, a frustrating progress. Once we hit a depth of 32 meters, and our analysis of the soil ensured that the water would be sufficiently clean to safely consume, we pulled out the drill and drove in a PVC pipe casing for the well which came in roughly four-meter increments and were sealed together with a potent plastic cement (which smelled strongly of rubbing alcohol and motor oil - the phrase ‘moonshine for robots’ popped into my mind at one point). After the casing was driven to the bottom of the well and it was shock-chlorinated, a third machine was brought in to pump filthy water out of the well, a process which would take 20 hours of continuous work. Unfortunately, due to severe weather and the delays from the well’s collapse, Stanley and Gerson had to work alone as we made the long drive back to Guatemala City on the final day, finishing out the pumping of dirty water and building a cement cap and mechanical well pump to ensure that surface contaminants would not enter the water table. This was, according to Stanley and Gerson, a particularly difficult well to drill (though there was one in a neighboring community that had been under construction for an entire month and was still not finished, owing to similar issues that we had faced). However, it was because of their extensive experience that the project went as smoothly as it did and was successful. Stanley himself has completed over 300 wells over nearly 20 years of working with LWI! A big shout out to him and Gerson for their brilliant work.